MeghanIsMe

I love Red Dead Redemption and have been excited about trying RDR2 since it came out in 2018. It was on sale a couple days ago, so I finally bought it.

The world is immense, and so full of things to do! Creatures to study and track, plants to locate, fish to catch, legendary animals to hunt. The collector in me could be very happy spending hours finding all these things to fill in the entries in the in-game compendium.

The graphics are gorgeous! Whether riding through the rocky landscape or playing poker at a makeshift telegraph wire spool-turned-table, the detail of everything is amazing. I want so much to spend the approximately 77 hours it takes to do all the primary story content and extras in the game.

But I can't. The character I'm playing is simply not someone I can enjoy being. I've only played a couple hours and have had to kill guards on a train my gang is robbing and threaten two different witnesses to what I did with death. The next work I'm supposed to do for my gang is to find three people who've borrowed money from our loan shark and extract it from them. On top of that, I went into a bar where a friend was talking to some women, probably sex workers. Without confirmation (or choice on my part) I asked one of them "So how much do you cost?"

I confirmed last night via reviews that, while you can do your best to make honorable choices and refrain from killing innocent people unnecessarily, this kind of horribleness is an inescapable part of the game's story.

I was trying to think last night of something in my life to analogize this experience to and I remembered starting to read "Lord Foul's Bane," the first book in Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series. The books are held in high regard by critics and readers alike and represent a vast, immersive world to be lost in for scores of hours. Shortly into the first book, I read the scene wherein the protagonist rapes someone and I gave up. I just couldn't keep going and enjoy what I was reading.

I feel like that with RDR2. There's so much amazing content there that I *know* I could happy spent many hours losing myself in. But not as that character. That I can't do. The protagonist of the first RDR was a former gang member (who is actually in your gang in RDR2 - it's a prequel), but while the moral choices for him to make are often complex and the world is often a dark one, I could make choices that left me feeling like I was genuinely doing my best to be a good person. I think that's mandatory in my escapist fiction. Because it's not an option in RDR2, I just can't enjoy it.

I'm going to see if we can return it.

And now for a style of gaming completely different!

Danae and I are playing a *lot* of Guild Wars 2. It's a ton of fun. However, I find that I am limited in more difficult parts that require a lot of movement/skill use combination because of my chronic wrist pain.

I have a mouse I love with three joysticks on it that I've mapped enough controls to that I can play with one hand. (I don't know what I'm going to do when this long-discontinued mouse dies; it literally makes games playable for long periods without nearly debilitating wrist and arm pain.) But I have to look down at the bottom of the screen to click the skill buttons and I can't do that while moving and dodging and tracking enemies in combat when things are very complex. (Mapped to my mouse, I have movement on one joystick. Mounting/dismounting, inventory, and trading post on another, and map and the interact key on the third. There are a few open positions left for mapping functions, but not nearly enough for all the combat skills I'd want to have easy access to.

Danae thought maybe I could try playing a tanky build; one who can stand around and soak damage. However, it seems to me like Guild Wars encourages more rounded, less single-purpose characters who all have the ability to engage in relatively complex combat strategies when dealing with high-level content. And that's awesome! But makes it harder to do things one-handed.
If you're curious, this is the mouse I have. I bought it new old stock from Amazon, and found a third party driver that someone wrote that allows much more functionality for the joysticks. I would hug the person who wrote it if I could and they liked hugs.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/80954-sandio-3d-game-o2-mouse-review

So much to write about! I chopped it up into LJ-cut sections just to make it easier to jump to things that may interest you if you don't want to read it all.

( Piper )

( board gaming )

( cooking )

( electroncs )

So that's basically what I've been up to.

I just submitted requests to join some student organizations at Syracuse. The Gaming Club (of course!), Students Advancing Sexual Safety and Empowerment (SASSE) which is a feminist, sex-positive, anti-violence group, and Pride Union, an LGBTQ group. I hope to make friends and find opportunities for activism!